Calculating the Band Structure of Photonic Crystals Through the Meshless Local Petrov-Galerkin (MLPG) Method and Periodic Shape Functions

Abstract

This paper illustrates how to determine the bandgap structure of photonic crystals through MLPG. This method is akin to the Finite Element Method (FEM), as it also deals with the discretization of weak forms and produces sparse global matrices. The major difference is the complete absence of any kind of mesh. We concentrate in a particular version of it, the MLPG4, also known as Local Boundary Integral Equation Method (LBIE). Since the boundary conditions governing the electromagnetic field are periodic in a unit cell, we develop a special scheme to embed this feature on the shape functions used in the discretization process. As a result, boundary conditions do not need to be imposed on the unit cell. Index Terms—Electromagnetic wave propagation, finite element methods, integral equations, photonic crystals.